Final Destruction of the Wicked. — Objections Considered.
1. "If final destruction be the doom of all the wicked, this sameness of end, involving all alike in one undistinguishable ruin, seems to do away with the Scripture doctrine of degrees of punishment. , If all are destroyed,, all are involved in the same doom."
To my own mind this appears one of the very strongest of all objections to the views suggested. And it is incumbent on me therefore to consider it, although I am not aware that it has been brought forward by any opponent. But our aim is truth. Let it be admitted as indisputable that there are, as we easily perceive there ought to be, degrees of punishment. How does the theory I suggest provide for this? Now suppose I answer frankly that I feel some little difficulty here. What then? Are there no difficulties connected with almost everything we believe? We believe on evidence. And evidence may be sufficient to compel belief, even though there may remain some difficulties unexplained. Why do I reject the popular doctrine? Not because of the difficulties in which it is involved. But because, first, I do not find it taught in Scripture; and secondly, I think I do find something else taught there very distinctly. It will be admitted by all who have attentively studied the Scriptures, that we often have there grand outlines of truth, the details of which are reserved. Or, we have vast masses of truth, whose reality is apparent, but the twilight hour of this incipient stage of our existence does not permit us to discern clearly the outlines thereof. "Now we see as through a glass darkly." One thing however will suggest itself to the reader, on this point, as very obvious. Namely, that it is quite conceivable that the length of time which shall elapse ere the wicked utterly cease to be, and the degree of suffering by which their final dissolution shall be preceded and accompanied, may be exactly proportioned to their various deserts. This idea cannot, at all events, be designated as incomprehensible. Nor is it absurd. And it would meet the case. It would also be in harmony with the universal order of things. There may be latent laws in existence and operation, the natural effect of which would be perfectly to proportion suffering to crime. Many things consonant with this will immediately occur to the mind of the intelligent reader. "Whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap." I cannot undertake to affirm that this, to us obvious proceeding, will be the precise mode in which the exceedingly various degrees of criminality will meet their just desert. To the fact of degrees of guilt, we must adhere. And then the consequence is inevitable. The suggestion already made may prove correct. If so, it would perfectly meet the objection. But now would it not be well just to consider for a moment how the supposed objection affects the popular view? Is it an objection which any advocate of orthodoxy can safely urge against me? Assuredly not. Is it a dangerous weapon for orthodoxy to touch? If any of the believers in eternal torment attempt to employ it against me their brethren may well say, "Save us from our friends." And if I have not hesitated to admit something of difficulty involved in the Scripture doctrine of the less guilty being beaten with few, and the more guilty with many stripes, how intensely ought the holders of the current doctrine to feel themselves pressed with the same difficulty. It is now my turn to object. And the objection is incomparably more weighty as against orthodoxy. Let us see. You believe that every individual of the human race, who is not born again of the Spirit, no matter for age or other circumstances, "shall be cast into outer darkness, with weeping, wailing and gnashing of teeth;" shall receive "indignation and wrath, tribulation and anguish;" and "shall be tormented day and night forever and ever." You also believe in degrees of guilt. That is, you believe there is the first faint dawn of responsibility; that as people die at all ages, and under all circumstances, they die very soon after becoming responsible agents, and while yet their responsibility, owing either to age, intelligence, education, or other circumstances, is infinitesimally small. Yet the least vicious of the heathen, and the least guilty of the unregenerate in England, they whose advantages were the most scanty, while their disadvantages were the most enormous, are, on the popular theory, all handed over to eternal torment. For them, as well as for the vilest, is there never-ending suffering. I know very well that many intelligent and pious persons, on whom the almost universal doctrine has taken too deep a hold to permit them altogether to abandon it in words, are in the habit of consoling their minds with the reflection that—as there are these manifestly innumerable gradations of guilt, from the faintest rudimental form thereof, up to its fearfullest maturity,—so the future punishment of multitudes who will fail of Heaven shall be so light in comparison as scarcely to deserve the name. In this way, to my knowledge, do some who are not willing to deny the common doctrine altogether, to relieve their own minds, when they contemplate the futurity of the unsaved. Then why preach an indiscriminate allotment to one common hell? If some of the lost, the least guilty of all, will suffer but little, why does the common doctrine, as taught from our pulpits, keep this out of sight, and reiterate the assertion, that for all who are not fit for Heaven there is eternal "weeping, and wailing, and gnashing of teeth." But alas! this view, which seems to make some approach to equity, to pay some tribute of respect to the strong instinctive sense of justice and righteousness which man, the product of an all-wise Creator's hand, can never quite lose—will not bear the light. It yields no solid relief to the distracted mind. Only let it be examined, and the objection continues in nearly its original force. For, First,—This very light punishment—of the more thoughtful of the orthodox—is to be ETERNAL! Nothing can disguise that. Let it be granted that in the case of multitudes the positive inflictions be comparatively light. Give to orthodoxy every advantage. Let it soften and modify at pleasure. Still there is this element of ETERNALITY! And to think of even a light punishment lasting forever, in a world where there is no alleviation, no hope; and this the portion of the least guilty—eternally shut out of Heaven, eternally lost, to live forever, conscious of being forever doomed to despair; denied all pleasant employment—nothing honorable, nothing good, to engage the conscious powers—no possibility of personal improvement, or elevation of character, all the happiness of the saved eternally beyond their reach, and dark, dark despair their everlasting portion? To think of the punishment of those whose guilt is of the faintest shade, as mere privation, loss of all happiness, forfeiture of all good, and this felt and groaned under forever by spirits that necessarily pine for good, certainly does not bring the lowest degree of punishment down to the first point of criminality in the moral scale. Still it is an infinite punishment for a finite demerit. And thus assuredly the orthodox are not in a condition to object that our theory scarcely consists with degrees of punishment. Their objection however has been replied to; and in addition I have undertaken to show how, while on the views of this volume the difficulty can be met, it remains in all its force against the very parties who would fain urge it. And, Secondly,—While orthodoxy in its mildest form would exhibit the punishment of some as consisting in privation merely—losing sight of all that this privation necessarily involves—it may be fairly submitted to them that even this poor solace fails them. For let the least guilty, those who had fewest religious advantages, or who died shortly after their responsibility had commenced, be shut up in hell, in the lake of fire prepared for the devil and his angels. Let them recognize that they have lost. Let them recognize that the vilest wretches that ever disgraced humanity, and the fiends that tempted them to evil, are to be their associates forever; that through eternal ages the wrath of God is to rest upon them; and that there is no hope, no not the faintest; and how long will their original disparity in wickedness continue? Or does orthodoxy dream that there will be no fearful growth of character in hell? We are often hearing how matured the devil has become in the hellish arts of temptation, by the practice of ages. The faculties of the saints also will expand in Heaven. They shall rise from one degree of moral elevation to another. They shall become equal to their present conceptions of what the loftiest angels are. They shall become unutterably more than even this. And this by the laws of their intellectual and moral nature—not by miracle. Will not then the lost, if immortality be inalienably inwrought into the very essence of their being, as some affirm, continue of necessity in like manner to attain to one enormous growth in wickedness after another; just as here on earth, "wicked men and seducers wax worse and worse?" Will the child in wickedness, by some strange process of mental and moral petrifaction, continue a child forever? How long will they who, on their entrance within the adamantine gates of hell, were the least depraved, and were therefore subjected to the lesser torment, remain thus comparatively unhardened in sin; when they find themselves in a world where there is no chance of struggling back into virtue, no opportunity afforded; but where all their associates are the unutterably vile, and many of them even demons, whose rage and cruelty and abhorrence of God and holiness are beyond the power of tongue to describe? Will they not, themselves, must they not, by dire necessity of nature, become fearfully confirmed in wickedness? Finding themselves irretrievably doomed to woe, for the evil they had done during their brief abode on earth, while their responsibility was but commencing, will they not hate with ever-growing intensity of hatred the God who has thus plunged them into hopeless misery? But I cannot pursue the thought. The mind turns away, unable to bear the ideal scene. In another sense than the prophet's, "the whole head is sick, and the whole heart is faint." And yet it is almost necessary that we should gird up our loins for the fearful task. Let the reader however admit, what indeed he ought not for a moment to question, that there will be expansion, development, growth of intellectual power and moral character, in the next state. And this as a matter of course; by virtue of the very laws which the Creator hath stamped upon our being. And then, in one indiscriminate hell, will not all degrees of guilt, all shades of character, be soon confounded? And under the influence of despair, under the promptings of hatred to him who hath thus plunged them into one abyss, and wrought on by the conduct of their fellow-sufferers, and goaded by their torments, and maddened by the hot tumult and hellish strife of those doleful regions, which they are consciously to endure forever and ever,—will not, must not, all the doomed inhabitants of the pit soon attain to a giant growth in wickedness? This, as it appears to us, is the inevitable tendency of the sense of eternal despair. And if the friends of this tremendous orthodoxy shall object to the representation we have given, it is submitted that, however they may shrink therefrom, it is nevertheless perfectly fair. Fair, do I say? It is a most subdued and faint and feeble intimation of one legitimate consequence of their cherished faith. Exaggeration is utterly impossible. And let them never close their eyes to anything they really believe. There is no merit in refusing to see. Voluntary blindness is no virtue. To acquiesce implicitly in everything the righteous Judge really determines, is indeed the pleasant duty of a child of God, as pleasant to our own minds as it is filially becoming. But51unquestionably to acquiesce in a human and therefore possibly mistaken interpretation of his counsels, is quite another thing. The former is a virtue, the latter a fault. Rather indeed than I should write or speak a word of irreverent reflection on any of the divine proceedings, let my right hand forget her cunning, and my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth. I would cheerfully die a thousand deaths, rather than allow the faintest shadow of an unworthy thought of the Most High God, my Creator, and Redeemer, and Father, to harbor in my mind. Let my heart be torn quivering from my wretched bosom ere it become the allowed lurking place of one traitorous suspicion of the rectitude of his decisions, "whose work is perfect; for all his ways are judgment; a God of truth and without iniquity, just and right is he." And I pray the orthodox, in their fairness and kindness, not to mistake my remarks on their interpretation of Scripture, for reflections on the divine testimony itself. I trust to be found to "tremble at God's words" as reverently as themselves. But I deem them wrong, fearfully wrong, in their interpretation of "the lively oracles." And it is their (to my mind) utterly mistaken and terrible injurious doctrine that I speak of thus freely; and not any doctrine of that blessed book which "is a lamp unto my feet and a light unto my path;" "the joy and rejoicing of my heart," "better unto me than thousands of gold and silver." But to return to our point, after this brief digression, prompted by a natural solicitude to prevent misapprehension. It was objected that our theory is incompatible with the Scripture doctrine of degrees of punishment. To this it was replied, First, that there was one very obvious method by which, though all that were unfit for existence should be finally destroyed, the sufferings to be endured might yet be proportioned to their guilt. An exact providence might perfectly serve that retributive justice which the Scriptures intimate; or, the silent but sure operation of latent laws might accomplish the result. And, Secondly, it was submitted that whatever weight there may be in the objection, it lies properly and with tremendously accumulated force against the popular doctrine itself, rather than against our own. For that the orthodox belief, while it holds to degrees of punishment in words, in reality confounds all variety of crime and award, by dooming even the least guilty to endless punishment, and that under circumstances which must inevitably obliterate all traces of original disparity of guilt. And thus the best artillery of our opponents seems to us no longer to play upon our ranks, but, inevitably abandoned by those who brought it into the field, to be successfully turned against them, and to become a frowning rampart to defend the position which it was planted to assail. 2. If a vast multitude of irreclaimable sinners were really to be destroyed, such a fearful catastrophe would surely have been more explicitly announced in the Scriptures. To which also two replies instantly suggest themselves. First, that this awful consummation is affirmed as plainly as words can teach it, if only we take the language of Scripture in its plain and obvious sense. We need not here repeat the texts so often quoted in the course of this discussion; but what words or figures would convey the idea, if those employed throughout the New Testament on this subject are not allowed to teach it? The wicked are "stubble," "chaff," "tares," that are to be "burned up;" they are faithless servants, or rebellious subjects, that are to be "cut asunder," "slain;" they are to be "punished with everlasting destruction [proceeding] from the presence of the Lord, even from the glory of his power;" to be "cast into a lake of fire," and to be "destroyed both body and soul in hell." Really the objection seems to me utterly destitute of force. But if the friends who differ think otherwise, let them, Secondly,—consider how the principle, on which their objection is founded, will bear on the popular creed, on behalf of which it is urged against us. Is not the objection much more becoming and reasonable as proposed by us against the common belief? May we not, with incomparably more propriety, urge that if the orthodox doctrine were the true one, it would most assuredly have been set forth in a far different manner than that in which inspired writers have expressed themselves on the subject? If for myriads of God's intelligent, though, alas! rebellious creatures, there were a whole eternity of torment, would the teachers of this appalling doctrine have contented themselves with the few and simple expressions which are usually quoted in its support? Read our popular hymns on the subject, and see how Watts and others have set forth the future. Or, if it please better, read Pollok's description of the torments of hell. But no, my brethren will properly refuse to ask the poet's aid. And yet the popular doctrine cannot be exaggerated. Come, however, to cool and prosaic divines. Take that mighty and excellent man, Jonathan Edwards. Read his sermons on the subject, and see the manner in which it is natural for the soberest men to express themselves, who really believe the doctrine. But we need not prolong our remarks. If there be any force at all in the objection, it lies really against the popular doctrine, and not against our own.—"Future Punishment," by H. H. Dobney.